Manny Rios swiped a bead of sweat off his brow with the back of his sunburned forearm, the summer asphalt of the downtown Montrose street fair seeping up through the soles of his scuffed work boots. At 53, he’d been restoring vintage camping gear out of his garage workshop for 12 years, ever since he quit his corporate outdoor retail job days after his divorce was finalized, and he’d done enough of these regional swaps to know the last two hours of the day were dead weight. Most attendees were already hauling their finds to their trucks or lined up at the food trucks for loaded green chile nachos, and he’d already sold three restored 1970s Kelty packs and a mint condition 1968 Coleman lantern, enough cash to cover the cost of his new industrial sanding belt and a solo weekend trip up to the Uncompahgre National Forest to test out a vintage down sleeping bag he’d spent three weeks patching. He was halfway through stacking leftover packs under his folding table when a shadow fell over the checkered tablecloth.
He looked up. He knew her immediately. Lila Marlow, ex-wife of the county sheriff who’d been perp-walked out of the courthouse three days prior, booked for embezzling $120k in county search and rescue funds. The whole town had been talking about nothing else, half the gossipers claiming she’d helped him cook the books, the other half whispering she’d had no clue and was stuck holding the bag for his years of secret horse race gambling debts. Manny had only spoken to her twice before: once at a search and rescue volunteer banquet five years back, once when she’d dropped off a broken cast iron camp stove at his shop last spring and he’d told her he was booked solid for three months. He’d thought she was pretty then, but he’d written it off as a stupid, fleeting thought, the kind he’d learned to squash fast after his ex-wife left him for a part-time ski instructor, when he’d decided all relationships were just a fast track to disappointment and messy public embarrassment.
She leaned in to yell over the classic rock cover band playing two booths down, her sun-streaked auburn hair falling forward over one shoulder, the hem of her faded linen button-down brushing the edge of his table. Her bare arm brushed his when she reached out to run a finger over the brushed aluminum frame of the 1972 backpack he’d left on display, and he felt a jolt run up his spine, sharp and warm, the kind he hadn’t felt in close to a decade. She smelled like pine dish soap and rose lip balm, and he could see the faint smudge of charcoal on her wrist, the same kind he used to mark lengths of replacement webbing for old packs.
“Had one just like this in college,” she said, pulling her hand back like she’d realized she was lingering too long, her dark eyes holding his for a beat longer than strictly polite. “My ex threw it out when we moved into the house on Oak Street. Said it was too beat up to keep.” She laughed, dry and quiet, and Manny noticed the small silver hoop in her left nostril, the faint pale scar across her left eyebrow he’d never spotted from a distance before. “Turns out he threw out a lot of things that were worth keeping.”
Manny nodded, his throat suddenly dry. He knew everyone in town was avoiding her: grocery store cashiers ringing her up without small talk, her former book club friends crossing the street when they saw her coming. A tiny, skittish part of him wanted to tell her to move along, that he didn’t need the drama of being seen talking to the ex-sheriff’s wife, that he liked his quiet, predictable life just fine. But a louder, bolder part of him was drawn to the way she didn’t shrink when a group of sheriff’s department volunteers walked past, glaring at her over their plastic beer cups.
“Restored the frame myself,” he said, tapping the pack’s cross strap. “Replaced all the webbing, sewed up the tear in the bottom pocket with waxed thread. Holds 40 pounds easy, same as it did the day it rolled off the line.”
She grinned, and when she passed him her credit card to pay for the pack, their fingers brushed again, this time on purpose, he was almost certain. When a loud custom motorcycle roared past the booth, loud enough to make the table shake, she stepped closer, her shoulder pressing firm to his bicep for three full seconds, her warmth seeping through the thin cotton of his faded work shirt, before she stepped back again.
He wrapped the pack up in brown craft paper for her, and when he handed it over, she nodded toward the dive bar at the end of the street, the one with the neon Pabst sign that had been half burnt out since 2018. “I’m gonna go drop this off in my truck then get a cold one,” she said, not looking away from his face. “You should join me. If you don’t care what people say, anyway.”
Manny hesitated for half a second, glancing at the group of volunteers still loitering by the taco truck, already whispering and pointing in their direction. He thought of his quiet empty house, the leftover meatloaf in his fridge, the solo hiking plan he’d spent three weeks mapping out. He thought of the way her shoulder felt pressed to his, the rough edge of her chipped nail polish when their fingers brushed, the fact that no one had asked him to get a beer just for the hell of it in almost two years.
“Give me ten minutes to pack up,” he said.
He loaded his remaining gear into the back of his beat-up rust-spotted Ford F-150 faster than he’d ever packed up a booth before, ignoring the curious stares from the other vendors. When he walked into the bar, she was already sitting in the back booth, a bottle of his favorite IPA sitting in front of the empty seat across from her, like she’d known what he drank. She kicked off her scuffed leather sandals under the table, and when her bare foot brushed his calf as he sat down, he didn’t pull away. They talked for an hour, first about the packs he restored, then about the time she’d hiked Longs Peak when she was 22, then about how she’d filed for divorce six months before her ex got arrested, how no one in town had bothered to ask her side of the story.
The bar emptied out as the sun dipped below the San Juans, the half-broken neon sign casting soft pink and blue light over the booth. She leaned forward across the table, her elbow brushing his, and he could see the flecks of gold in her dark eyes. When she reached across the table to brush a fleck of sawdust off his jaw, her fingers warm against his stubbled skin, he lifted his beer bottle to clink against hers, the cool glass clinking soft over the hum of the bar’s jukebox playing an old Johnny Cash deep cut.
